Welcome to our lesson on Quarto!
This module was created by Fridah Ntika '25.
Quarto is an open-source system for publishing documents. It is markdown-based and allows you as the user to combine text with R code (or Python, Julia, or Observable code), tables, and visualizations in a single document that can be rendered into HTML, PDF, Word, websites, analytics dashboards, and slideshows. Because it is heavily markdown-based, it is essential that you know R Markdown syntax. If you are not familiar with it, here is the R Markdown module.
For applied data analysis, Quarto supports reproducible analysis, much like R Markdown. This means that your code and results live together in one document. When you update your code or data set, your entire document updates automatically.
Quarto has become very popular among data scientists because of its versatility with languages. It is also ramping up because it serves as a middle point for analysts, engineers, and stakeholders to meet.
Quarto and R Markdown have very similar syntax and workflow models, but they also have major differences.
R Markdown was built for R and so has R as its dependency.
To use other extensions such as bookdown, distill, and blogdown, the user has to install them as separate packages.
Uses knitr to execute code and publish the document/webpage.
Quarto does not depend on RStudio. It does not have an R dependency. This means that it works with R, Python, Julia, Observable JS, and any other in the future. It is not tied to any one language.
Because Quarto is multilingual, the user can run multiple languages in the same file.
The packages that need to be installed in R Markdown are built in Quarto.
Quarto can be run on R Studio, the command line, JupyterLab, and VS Code.